Marco Rubio Pathetically Plays the LGBT Victim

With Rick Santorum now officially in the GOP nomination race, expect Marco Rubio to prostitute himself to the Christofascists with even more desperation.  Like Bobby Jindal, Rubio seems to think that if he says enough inflammatory anti-gay things that the elderly whites in the GOP base will overlook the fact that he's not "white" by their definition.  Hence the increasing flow of lunacy and pathetic statements of victimization coming from Rubio.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at Rubio's pathetic and insulting statements of late.  Here are excerpts:

Poor Marco Rubio. With history rushing past him, its dust gritty in his eyes, he, the bully, resorts to playing the victim.

And so it was on Tuesday, when he tried—in this now-practiced right-wing way—to claim that he and other Christians were the victims of LGBTs and their demands for, er, basic equality and civil rights.

What else can Rubio do? People like him have lost the argument.  All they can do now, after years of fostering a climate of prejudice and persecution against LGBTs, is to claim that with the prospect of equality, it is they, the bullies, who are persecuted.

They cannot argue how equality affects them negatively, so merely claim to be victims.

On Tuesday, Rubio dared to use the phrase “hate speech” when describing how, one day, those who objected to marriage equality would be seen as propagating hate speech.

Does Marco Rubio have any idea of the toxicity of the phrase he is flinging around to score some cheap political capital?

Does he have any idea of the true “hate speech” LGBTs have suffered, not just on political platforms at the hands of people like Marco Rubio in their stoking of their Christian voting base—words like “unnatural,” “pretend families,” words of exclusion that seek to put us outside the boundaries of family, home, and love?

Because “hate speech” doesn’t end on political platforms. They’re the words that LGBTs hear before they are beaten by homophobes on street corners and in schoolyards. Beaten, sometimes fatally. How dare Marco Rubio seek to invoke a phrase like “hate speech” to feed his own pathetic persecution complex? Has he any idea of the true cost of “hate speech” as it has been used against LGBT people?

If you claim that LGBTs do not deserve marriage equality, and your argument has the ring of prejudice about it—and it necessarily would because you are arguing against the principles of equality—then expect to be called out for it.

But you are not being silenced. You are being disagreed with. And now you’re feeling persecuted because it’s not just LGBTs calling you out on it, but all those who believe people should be treated equally under the law.

Simply, Mr. Rubio, when will you stop scapegoating LGBTs to score votes?
In a way, Rubio’s nonsensical words are heartening. They are like the last gasp of a poisonous old world order of determined prejudice and discrimination. How furious and scared he must have been to see Catholic Ireland face down the kind of misinformation and lies he and his cronies propagate against LGBTs on Saturday, and vote instead for a future of equality.

Rubio and others like him know their grip on fear and prejudice is loosening. And so now, he plays the victim: it’s the last pathetic piece of pantomime left to him.

How a Victim Culture Gone Mad Harms Real Victims

Not to beat a dead horse, but in follow up to the last post, a piece in The Daily Beast - authored by a woman - looks at the risks of jumping on the band wagon of every self-professed victim without at least pausing to make sure the alleged facts and the story line match up with objective facts.  With two daughters and a grand daughter, I am certainly sensitive to women's issues and hold a deep disgust for those (typically heterosexual males) who physically and/or sexually abuse woman. But, perhaps due to the attorney in me, I know that it is critical to check out the facts.  Blindly believing your client without asking hard questions can leave one to find themselves ambushed in court or torn apart in an opposing counsel's brief.  The same holds true in journalism (which, by the way, I believe includes blogging - especially since readers will quickly tell me when I'm wrong) and is something Rolling Stone and Fox News need to learn.  Here are highlights from The Daily Beast article:

When Rolling Stone first published its explosive story detailing UVA student Jackie’s alleged gang-rape by seven fraternity brothers, few in the mainstream media doubted its veracity.

And by giving blind faith to Jackie’s story, Erdely obfuscated some of the truth, leading Rolling Stone to acknowledge “discrepancies in Jackie’s account” on Friday.

[I]n valorizing Jackie’s trauma as a victim of rape (never mind that she was and remains an alleged victim), Rolling Stone ignored glaring holes in a story that was too good to check.

Erdely’s story did damage to University of Virginia’s reputation, but more importantly, the story has done a tragic disservice to other victims of sexual violence who might be prevented from coming forward out of fear that their stories will have to withstand the scrutiny and default skepticism of police, university officials, and reporters.

Rolling Stone should be shamed for egregiously poor reporting, failing to fact-check important details like the date of the night Jackie claimed she was violently raped for three hours in a Phi Kappa Psi frat house (the fraternity did not, in fact, host a party that evening).

But of the hundreds of thousands, including journalists, who read the Rolling Stone story, few noticed Erdely’s failure to interview any of the seven men who participated in the attack on Jackie or corroborate many of the other easily corroborated details she reported.

When journalists did scrutinize what they viewed as weak and one-sided reporting, they were met with accusations of victim-blaming.
When Worth magazine editor-in-chief Richard Bradley voiced his skepticism in a blogpost, he was immediately declared a “UVA truther” by New York magazine contributing writer Marin Cogan, who compared him to 9/11 conspiracy theorists for even questioning Erdely’s story, despite including plenty of caveats that she might be telling the truth.

Cogan has since apologized for using the term and acknowledged she was wrong about the UVA story.

Jezebel’s Anna Marian attacked Reason writer Robby Soave for taking a similar stance as Bradley (in Marian’s words, Coave “takes Bradley’s giant ball of shit and runs with it.”) Marian too has since apologized, acknowledging that she was “dead fucking wrong.”

But others, like feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, have merely shifted focus to how “rape apologists” will greet the news of Rolling Stone’s admission of their report’s shortcomings, while still believing Jackie’s story . . . 

The lesson Marcotte drew from the magazine’s climbdown was that it was “interesting that rape apologists think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either.” She cited no examples. While others were debating the failings of Rolling Stone’s process, Marcotte was railing against “rape apologists [who] are so sure rapes are hoaxes...”

Still others attempted to turn the focus away from Jackie onto the magazine that credulously told her story. 

Of course Rolling Stone’s reputation should—and has—suffered from the Jackie debacle. And it will likely have a disastrous effect on Erdely’s career.

But writers like Marcotte and Valenti still cast Jackie as a victim, despite the growing evidence casting serious doubt on her story.

We live in a culture that valorizes victims—where to question one woman’s claims of sexual abuse is to be a “rape apologist,” someone who effectively dismisses heinous crime under any and all circumstances. If Jackie is lying, she will likely—and sadly—suffer for it. And she has already put herself in an unenviable position by reaffirming her version of events as described to Rolling Stone in a subsequent interview with the Washington Post.

The problem with valorizing the victim, as a “victim culture” does, is that anything that runs contrary to the victim’s narrative is cast as an attack on that person.

Question them, and you are colluding in exacerbating the awful effects of their trauma. Question their actions or motives and you are “victim shaming” and “victim blaming.” Of course, the flip-side of a victim is a bully, and it is notable that today, everyone rushes to be a victim—the right wing under attack from the left, the left under attack from the right, bigots still seeking to attack gay people, and claiming they cannot voice their bigotry.

The sad consequence of a culture of victimhood is that it obscures real victims and obscures the genuinely felt experiences of those victims, whatever they have endured.

I often bemoan the fact that we have so little good investigative reporting nowadays.  Perhaps, that is what Erdely thought she was doing.  But by not doing her fact checking and corroborating statements easily verifiable, she ended up acting no better than Fox News and pushing the story she perhaps wished was true and most certainly wanted readers to believe was true.  She did a huge disservice to everyone.